SWLW #630: The Adaptive CTO, What We Look for in a Resume, and more.

Like always, I am sharing my best findings for the week. Under "Culture," you'll find content worth reading and sharing with others; you'll need others' help to pull it off. Under "Peopleware," you'll find content that can help you approach situations differently with new perspectives and frameworks.   

 

This Week's Favorite

Stop Inventing Product Problems; Start Solving Customer Problems
6 minutes read.

"The prioritization process turns into haggling: we will solve this many product problems to this many design problems to this many developer problems. While everyone is haggling for themselves, there is no time left to exercise all that empathy for the customer.[…] In reality, no products are desirable to customers. Customers have desirable outcomes, which products can help them reach." -- It’s extremely hard to become world-class at building products with empathy for our customers. It doesn’t mean that engineers are becoming Product Managers but rather applying curiosity to go deeper into the pains and problems our customers have and see if we can help formalize (more) options to deliver relief or, even better - a great experience (often surprising) to resolve that customer need. Our secret weapon as engineers - we know how much things take, we know what is the hardest or riskiest part (thus the constraint we should question), and we’re creative to come up with more options to consider. The PMs will have partners (vs. numb builders) with a voice, clearer understanding, and ownership mindset.

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Culture

They Rebranded "Thinking"
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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AI Will Evolve Into an Organizational Strategy for All
5 minutes read.

Why do companies use hierarchy and have managers to start with? Tying it too quickly to solve our problems is too naive an approach to imagining solutions. People look for structures to reduce mental load or compensate for their inability to attract talent who can operate outside strict boundaries. AI is not close to helping us reduce complexity (in 2024, the opposite is true) nor reducing mental burden. However, it can increase the capacity of those seeking to expand beyond their obvious tasks and responsibilities.

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Writing Strategies and Visions
6 minutes read.

As we look at a new year ahead, it's always a good time to look (or write) at our written vision and strategy docs. Will Larson covers both vision and strategy and how to iterate on them.

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The Adaptive Chief Technology Officer
5 minutes read.

Useful view and frameworks to consider when looking at the different phases of a company and how the role of the CTO changes at each stage. The pitfalls section at each phase is incredibly useful as without putting enough attention there, as things will painfully break, and be extremely costly to fix as the company matures.

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Peopleware

What We Look for in a Resume
7 minutes read.

"We look for unique perspectives" -- Chip Huyen's post is packed with gems to learn from as you try to tell your career story in a resume. It should be interesting and relevant. It should get the reader to know something about you that is beyond the basics.

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In 15+ Years at Amazon, I Influenced 30+ Promotions to the Director Level. I Know Why Some People Get Promoted While Other "Top Performers" Get Overlooked. Here's What You Need to Know (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Ethan Evans with great points for moving up the ladder: "Your company expects broader skills at the next level. For example, you are a great product leader but at the VP level they want finance skills or some other qualification. Look at others in the role you want and ask your manager what is needed to get there. Some people will ask: Should I leave my job and go elsewhere? Not until you know the real problem. You must identify and address the root cause of your stagnation. Otherwise, you will hit the same roadblocks in other jobs."

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Write Down What You’ve Done
3 minutes read.

Terence Tao captures well why writing down things we've done or learned can help increase memory recall and make the information we consume into knowledge we can apply. This is true for any discipline in life we choose to master.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@patrickc: Increasingly believe that the "good, cheap, fast—choose two" maxim is devious misinformation spread by the slow. In my experience, "slow" and "expensive" usually go together. I was in a meeting yesterday where lopping a year off a project schedule also ended up reducing the cost substantially. Fundamentally, it takes time to spend, and adding the temporal constraint tends to make things simpler and more efficient.

@DavidSHolz: By VC standards we should either "conquer the world or die in a fire" and neither of these are spiritually compelling for me. I never wanted a company I just wanted a home. At this point we have a large and loyal paid community, we build tons of features for them (I think we did >30 releases this year) and they're pretty happy. We have enough revenue to fund tons of crazy R&D and our models are still the best by the metrics we care about (how the images look and how fun it is to make things). We have a huge backlog of exciting things to make our models way better. Zero risk. We did all this with no investors. Honestly, it feels like we are successful. The next metric of success I think about most about is now that we have "all I ever wanted" in terms of a big well funded R&D lab with cool people free to work on whatever we want... Can we now build something that would make baby David proud? And can we tell bold stories about a human future that people want to be a part of? I think we can.



p.s. if you're interested in joining SWLW's Slack channel, simply reply to this email and let me know. If you're leading a team, consider writing your Manager README (it's free) or getting my e-book and interviews Leading Snowflakes: The New Engineering Manager's Handbook. You can also support me by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️



Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.